Days of the Dead

The new narcocultura.

Osiel Cárdenas, who is now awaiting trial in the United States; the Holy Death cult draws devotees from the drug trade.Credit LEFT: REUTERS/LANDOV; RIGHT: JOSE CARLO GONZÁLEZ / LA JORNADA

Last May, an exhibit sponsored by the government of the Mexican state of Sinaloa compelled civic leaders in Culiacán, the capital, to denounce the artist Rosa María Robles and demand that the show be closed down. Comments left in the visitors’ book weren’t as harsh. After wandering aghast through installations that featured bloodied toilets and suspended children’s outfits pierced by dried cow tongues or long, knobby rubber penises, viewers wrote things like “It gave me nausea, but it made me think” and “This was very hard; it made me want to cry.” A few even thanked Robles for the exhibit.

Sometimes a black boot was displayed in the act of shattering an ostrich egg. Not every viewer may have understood that this was the artist’s way of critiquing the macho narcotraficante culture of her native state, which has brought with it uncounted acts of violence, including hundreds of murders each year. But many did understand: people in Sinaloa know that los narcos actually wear those absurd boots—most fashionably made of ostrich leather—and in these hard times every day brings news of more lives they have shattered. And even a clueless outsider could grasp the meaning of the exhibit’s most controversial and memorable installation, referred to in the catalogue as “Red Carpet.” It was pieced together from the heavy woollen blankets typical of the Sinaloa mountain region, which, in the exhibit, were stiff with dried blood. Everyone in Sinaloa knows by now that in the wave of drug-related murders some of the most notorious victims have been the levantados, or pickups: cops or police chiefs or traffickers who are kidnapped, and whose mutilated corpses, wrapped in blankets, appear later. Rosa María Robles had somehow managed to obtain some of the blood-soaked blankets that had been used in such murders, but after the show opened state investigative police confiscated the blankets, on the ground that they are legal evidence.

Robles, a tiny, wiry, loquacious woman who wears tight jeans and clingy tops, has spent most of her life in Culiacán. In the mid-nineties, she earned a respectable reputation crafting enormous, menhir-like monuments from tree trunks that fetched up on the banks of a river that runs through the city. Her artistic concerns at the time, she told me, were mainly ecological. In 2006, her work took a different turn when, in a sort of trance, she began assembling the exhibit she called “Navajas” (“Razors”). The various installation pieces came together quickly “and without stumbling,” she said one afternoon in her home, a sparsely furnished rented house in a dusty neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

“They ask me why I want to give this negative image of Sinaloa,” she said. “But I don’t. The image is already there. ‘Razors’ is about violence, but it calls for a reflection about the signs of decadence that surround us.”

“Razors” is both raw and stagy, and overwhelming in a way that does not really play fair with the viewer. Indeed, Robles could be accused of trafficking in the same kind of bloody one-upmanship that the drug trade is currently engaged in. (When the authorities confiscated the bloody blankets, she cut one of her veins, collected the blood in a chamber pot, and painted a new set of blankets with it.) But, in her messy response to the mayhem around her, Robles, like many Mexicans who watched indifferently as the drug terror developed over the decades, is only just learning how to react to it.

Sinaloa lies on the Pacific Ocean, six hundred and fifty miles south of the United States border. There is a significant fishing industry, some tourism along the coast, a fertile valley around Culiacán (in which a good portion of all the tomatoes, eggplants, and melons consumed in the United States is grown), and, east of this, a scraggly, steep, and serrated mountain range. This is the Sierra Madre Occidental; few paved roads wind along these mountains. Cannabis grows widely in the region. During the dry season, the sierra is parched; when the rains come, it bursts into life long enough for a poppy crop to bloom, leaving behind fields of round green pods heavy with narcotic milk. Spraying crops that grow at such a steep incline is difficult; persuading smallholders to eradicate a crop that offers prosperity and has been a way of life for decades is almost always impossible. Given the conditions, there is nothing surprising about the persistence of a clandestine drug trade in the region. What is unusual, perhaps, is how wrong things had to go before anyone paid attention.

In Sinaloa, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a reporter, columnist, and editor for the scrappy local newspaper Río Doce, is an exception to the general indifference. Having for years made it his business to know a great deal about drug issues, he is a mandatory stop for Mexican and foreign journalists trying to figure out the Culiacán drug scene. Valdez is about forty, stocky, swarthy, and graying, but there is something of the cocky teen-ager in his manner. We had lunch on a scorching Culiacán afternoon, and he recited with studied weariness the stages of his home state’s emergence as the crucible of Mexico’s drug crisis. It was in the late nineteenth century, he said, that the opium harvest first became visible, encouraged by the arrival of Chinese immigrants who had come to build a railroad. There was, he added, the long-standing local use of marijuana, particularly by Mexican soldiers, who got through the useless hours of patrol and guard duty with the help of a spliff or two. There was the almost certainly apocryphal—but nevertheless widely believed—story that during the Second World War the United States urged Sinaloa to boost its (illegal) production of opium in order to meet the medical needs of G.I.s wounded in combat. There was, for real, the gigantic marijuana boom in the nineteen-sixties, fuelled by demand in the United States. And, Valdez noted, there was the notable decline in illegal crop harvests in the late seventies, as the result of a series of violent and ambitious assaults on growers carried out by the Mexican federal police with the support of the Mexican Army, and with the energetic encouragement of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

“That was when the drug trade really began to expand,” Valdez said. “Because the few traffickers who remained here were killed, but all the rest of them emigrated. Now they’re all over the country.”

Forty years after Operación Intercepción—which was followed by Operación Cooperación, Operación Cóndor, and other drug-war initiatives—as much as thirty per cent of Mexico’s arable land is suspected of being under cultivation for clandestine crops, drug violence in Sinaloa has taken a quantitatively different turn, and the Sinaloa traffickers have generated entire dynasties of criminals who are at war in nearly every one of Mexico’s thirty-one states, as well as Mexico City.

The exiles who left Sinaloa for Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Ciudad Juárez in the nineteen-seventies included members of the Arellano Félix family; a bold operator called Joaquín Guzmán; and a schemer with a talent for international relations, Amado Carrillo. They and their elders spent the next two decades collaborating with Colombia’s drug kings on clandestine routes for delivering cocaine and marijuana to the United States. Beginning in the mid-nineties, after Pablo Escobar was killed and his main rivals were arrested, the Mexican associates assumed their rightful position in the global drug economy. The main access points to what is by far the largest market for drugs in the world are, after all, in Mexico. By the turn of the millennium, Mexico was exporting heroin and marijuana, transporting the majority of Colombian cocaine, and collaborating with Chinese traders in the production and export of methamphetamines. The Sinaloa traffickers, who had not necessarily remained friends, controlled access to all the major border points, with the exception of the ones in the Gulf Coast state of Tamaulipas. Those, the government believes, were the domain of Osiel Cárdenas, a particularly violent local trafficker.

With its key border cities of Nuevo Laredo (on the other side of the Rio Grande from Laredo) and Matamoros (across from Brownsville), the state of Tamaulipas is a coveted prize that Osiel Cárdenas’s former associates now control. They are, for the most part, ex-members of an élite Army anti-narcotics unit, operating under the code name los Zetas, and they have drastically upped the ante on all forms of violence; the practice of beheading their victims is one of their signal contributions to the drug trade.

Drug careers tend not to last very long: Osiel Cárdenas has been awaiting trial in the United States for nearly two years, since pleading innocent in February, 2007. Three of the Arellano Félix brothers, who operated out of Tijuana, are dead or in jail, and one was arrested last week. The most skillful trafficker of them all, Amado Carrillo, who once had a fleet of jets to ferry his goods from his base in Ciudad Juárez, and who liked to be called the Lord of the Skies, is also gone. In 1997, having decided to move his business to South America and set up housekeeping in Buenos Aires, he went to Mexico City for radical liposuction and facial renovation. He died in the recovery room, from a fatal mix of anesthetics and sleeping potion, according to newspapers at the time. (His attending physicians died as well, discovered months later encased in cement.)

The most visible member of the exile generation of drug traffickers still at large is Joaquín Guzmán, commonly known as El Chapo (a Sinaloan term for men who are short and built like refrigerators). It is said by people in Sinaloa that, seven years after El Chapo escaped from prison in a laundry cart and rose to the top of law enforcers’ most-wanted lists (and an unspecified amount of time since he acquired a jet plane that, according to some reports, was once used by the C.I.A. for rendition flights), he still throws parties at his ranch in the Sinaloa hill country. It is said that he recently closed down a restaurant in Culiacán, confiscating the other diners’ cell phones until he and his friends had finished their meal (and paid handsomely for the meals of his hostages as well), and that, at a wake in Culiacán in May, some of El Chapo’s men showed up to ask if the bereaved family would move, at no further cost, to a more elegant parlor at another location. When the family complied, the body of Joaquín Guzmán’s hulking son, Edgar, who had been shot down outside a shopping mall, was brought in. And it is said that the street was then closed off so that El Chapo could weep over his murdered child in privacy.

Those are the stories. What is certain is that the campaign that has filled Mexican life with daily news of vicious crime—torture, kidnappings, beheadings—is being fought by Chapo Guzmán against his former allies. These include, first of all, the Beltrán Leyva family, which allegedly ordered the murder of Edgar and which, it was reported last week, may have infiltrated the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. But Guzmán is also locked in combat with the remaining members of the Arellano Félix drug clan, in Tijuana; with the brother of the plastic-surgery victim Amado Carrillo; and, above all, with the heirs of the Gulf Coast empire created by the extradited Osiel Cárdenas. The fight is over drug routes, particularly those that end in Tamaulipas and serve as access points to the United States, and over profitable illicit local businesses like prostitution and the smuggling of illegal immigrants. Included in the territorial bounty is the right to control an unknown number of the police and the military—cops and commanders both—who moonlight as the traffickers’ henchmen.

Since Edgar’s murder, there has been a surge in drug-related killings throughout the country. Nearly four thousand people have died so far this year. Sometimes the corpses are wrapped in the kinds of woollen blankets that Robles used for her “Red Carpet.” Sometimes the victims are beheaded. The bodies often show signs of torture. Javier Valdez, the journalist who monitors these matters, notes that the murder of Guzmán’s son signalled the beginning of a new type of war. “Before that death, they hadn’t messed with each other’s families,” and killings were highly targeted, he said. “Ahora va a estar más cabrón” (“Now the shit is going to hit the fan”). He suggested that I visit one of Culiacán’s newest cemeteries.

The cemetery has grown at a staid pace during the past forty years, but it seemed to me that now it could hardly keep up with demand. By eight o’clock that morning, earthmovers were digging up new sections. Some workers were laying in a honeycomb of new graves; others labored over an enormous new mausoleum. A man who has known the cemetery over a long period of time, and proved to be gregarious and helpful in the local way, provided a statistic: thirty per cent of the graveyard’s permanent residents had met a violent end. By and large, he said, they were up-country farmers, who got rich very quickly and died suddenly. The new mausoleums reflected the tension between the relatives’ need to mourn and their Sinaloan impulse to show off. No excess was too excessive, no preconceived notion of what a burying ground might contain stood in the way of creativity. Next to a massive black marble monument, with carved-stone columns and a chapel large enough to accommodate several rows of plastic chairs, one might turn to face an orange two-story affair with a cupola, a bell tower, balconies, and aluminum-frame windows that handsomely achieved a Fiesta Inn effect. Banners with portraits of the jowly, shirtsleeved deceased hung from the crenellated wall of another. A child’s shrine was covered with a mural of SpongeBob SquarePants. A modernist structure was crowned with a Pei-like crystal pyramid, encasing for all eternity a silver heart-shaped helium balloon.

“What the families want,” the man said, “is for their mausoleum to demonstrate the power they have over things.” Photographs of the departed showed bullish, thick-necked men in their mid-twenties or thirties, looking bored and dangerous, wearing bluejeans and extravagantly pointy ostrich-skin boots. In this boastful arena, the pictures had also been carefully chosen to show the dead man at his best. He frequently appeared on a chapel’s altar, unsmiling and surrounded by many bottles of whiskey, or perhaps even more bottles of beer; the implicit epitaph of the deceased was this: he could drink anybody under the table.

Felipe Calderón, a member by family tradition of the conservative Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), took over as his party’s second President of the current era in December of 2006, following seventy years of uncontested rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI. Calderón’s election was contested, and he was perceived by much of the electorate as a weak leader. The need to overcome this impression may have been a factor in his decision, almost immediately upon taking office, to involve the military in renewed combat against the drug trade—a fight that his predecessor, Vicente Fox, had less visibly pursued. The sight of troops patrolling the major arteries of cities like Ciudad Juárez and Morelia in armored cars has generated enormous local resentment, and offers vast opportunities for corruption in a military that, compared with the security forces, is not loathed, and remains—if only in the most relative terms—uncorrupt. (Among the many exceptions is an Army general who was removed as drug czar some years ago, when it was discovered that he was actually working for the Juárez drug trade.) Regardless, troops are now deployed across the country, resulting in mounting tension between the local security forces and the federal troops. Quite a few high-level arrests have been made, but drug crimes have increased wherever the troops patrol, a consequence of what several people I talked to described as “stirring up the chicken coop.” A certain nostalgia for the days when the PRI was in charge and the drug traffickers knew their place would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago, but it has encouraged old PRIistas to believe that the party can return to power in the 2012 elections.

In large part, though, it was the PRI’s defeat—or, rather, the long-withheld recognition of its defeat—and the dawn of real electoral politics that led to what appears to be the drug trade’s thorough infiltration of the political parties. This last according to a PRIista whom I shall call Héctor, who enjoyed a long and successful national career before retiring to his home state. In the old days, much of the money for what was essentially a ceremonial presentation of the candidate to his subjects came from the vast coffers of the one-party state. Modern media campaigns put an end to all that. “Thanks to the television stations, our campaign needs multiplied,” Héctor explained. “A congressman’s electoral campaign can now run to sixteen, seventeen million dollars.” Where is such money to come from? Informed opinion has it that each of the major drug groups now has ties to significant numbers of politicians in its party of choice, if not to the party itself. As for the current military offensive, Héctor gave a little snort of disgust. “When you see what amounts to a military parade in these towns, in which the Army is trooping along on the main avenue while on the side streets people are killing each other . . . when I see how these people”—the traffickers—“are climbing up right into the very beard of the state, I think, Holy fuck! This country could really collapse!”

There are limits on the way the government can wage its war on drugs. A government spokesman, Miguel Monterrubio, pointed out recently that when President Calderón came to office there were ten thousand federal law-enforcement agents in the entire country. Today, the total has increased to nearly thirty thousand—still a small number in a country that has a hundred and ten million people and a raging crime problem. “That’s why the government decided to involve the Army,” Monterrubio told me over coffee one morning. “If not them, who?”

There remains the problem of corruption. Several new vetting agencies, Monterrubio said, will conduct ongoing polygraph tests and background checks on all law-enforcement personnel. In the old days, there was a de-facto agreement between the government and the traffickers that the traffickers would kill each other among themselves. “But now,” Monterrubio said, “the traffickers have realized that they can use the murders to send a message through the media. It’s narco-terror.”

Calderón’s policy, which the Bush Administration is supporting with a $1.4-billion aid package, to be delivered beginning this year, is heavily weighted on the side of hardware and training for joint U.S.-Mexican operations along the border. Some critics would prefer a program that placed more emphasis on treatment for drug addiction and less on shootouts, but the question of whether a battle against drug use can be won by deploying military force is not one that government officials are willing to ask at this juncture. From the public’s point of view, the government’s crackdown has simply produced more violence.

“In the end, it’s all absurd,” Froylán Enciso, a friend of mine who is a historian specializing in the drug trade, remarked the other day. “The class solidarity between the troops and the growers is far greater than the soldiers’ need to obey orders. They bargain: ‘I need a statistic and you need to survive in this environment, so let’s deal.’ And the government gets its statistic, because every year they have to have a record-breaking figure for the press conference—more kilos of marijuana confiscated, more arrests made than ever before. And the cost that doesn’t get factored into the figures”—how much a kilo of cocaine paste sells for at the point of manufacture versus its street value—“is the cost of the narcocultura. Because the logistics and the infrastructure and the narco-helicopters and narco-submarines are only a part of it. The real value of the drugs is the cost incurred by traffickers, small and large, in steeling themselves against the risks involved in delivering the drugs to the final consumer. The narcocultura—the mausoleums and the music and the baseball caps embroidered with marijuana leaves in Swarovski crystals—is the array of symbols they surround themselves with in order to ward off that fear.”

On the first day of every month, at the Tepito metro stop in downtown Mexico City, a new breed of pilgrim can be observed inching his way on his knees out of the stop and down a filthy market street, and cradling in his arms, babylike, a plastic figure of Death—or Holy Death, La Santa Muerte, as the pilgrims refer to the robed skeleton, who carries, variously, a scythe, a sceptre, a set of scales, or a globe in her (sometimes his) hands. There were dozens of these effigies, borne by crawling men in their teens or early twenties. Tattooed and gaunt, they were dressed in black T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off and wore chains around their necks and silver skulls, like brass knuckles, on their fingers.

Their goal was some four blocks distant, in the heart of Tepito, a legendary neighborhood that in the centuries since the Spanish Conquest has remained stubbornly insubordinate. Venders were everywhere along the pilgrims’ path, hawking T-shirts and baseball caps and medals decorated with the Santa Muerte.

The shrine of the Holy Death is just blocks away from a compound of low-income housing where, in 2007, Mexico City police conducted a full-scale assault in search of drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods. Enriqueta Romero Romero, known as Queta, or Quetita, set up the shrine on this spot seven years ago after one of her sons, who was himself a devotee of La Santa, made her a gift of the skeleton. The bewigged saint now stands in a glass case, elaborately robed and veiled according to Queta’s inspiration—sometimes in rainbow gauze, sometimes in white lace. Queta and her son also more or less invented the 8 P.M. “Rosary” that is held on the first of every month, and draws thousands of the faithful, including the skull-ringed young men who, at a guess, make a paltry living running many kinds of errands for the lords of Tepito. Queta says the skeleton is feminine—the Niña Blanca, or White Girl-Child—and that those who say there is such a thing as a He-Death, and that one should have both on one’s home altar, so the two can meet and marry, are charlatans. Queta is small, sixtyish, and bustling; she blows kisses at her Niña every other sentence and has a benevolent smile for everyone. But her gaze can narrow with suspicion in an alarming fashion, and one has the sense that she can summon dangerous help to her side very quickly.

The Santa Muerte had been hanging around the fringes of popular belief in Tepito and other raffish neighborhoods for decades—Queta says that she learned to pray to her from her aunt—but thanks to Queta her cult now extends throughout Mexico City and far beyond. There are, by Queta’s count, two thousand shrines like hers in Mexico, and who knows if she is including the charlatans in her tally? (The cult is known for the drug traffickers’ devotion to it, but it certainly embraces a far larger number of believers.) Hers, at any rate, was the first public shrine, and it holds a cathedral-like status for worshippers like Felicitas Castillo, a young woman who for the past five years has travelled once a month from the city of Xalapa, two hundred miles away, in order to offer the “Utmost Holy Death” roses and a mariachi serenade. On the day that I visited the shrine, the musicians played ranchera songs that are normally dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Castillo provided an answer heard many times when I asked the faithful what they prayed for. “I don’t ask for much,” Castillo said. “Health for my family, work.” This is an answer recommended by Queta, who doesn’t think that one should bargain with Death or be greedy. But the following afternoon, as the time for the Rosary drew near and worshippers pressed more and more tightly into the narrow street where the shrine is situated, one crawling young man said that he was praying for his ex-girlfriend, who lived in another state, to let him see his five-month-old daughter. A woman wanted the holy figure to help her get over the suicide, last year, of her fourteen-year-old son.

Along the edges of the packed street, young men took quick snorts of glue and sometimes wept. A thin tattooed and pierced man with terrible skin was the only one of the many young toughs present who was willing to talk to me, and his amiability may have had something to do with the fact that he had just absent-mindedly assembled a joint about the size of a Robusto and was now wreathed in its smoke. The Holy Death had restored to him the love of the excruciatingly shy woman at his side, the man said, and he was now Death’s devotee forever. At the front of the crowd, banks of flowers to rival those laid at Princess Diana’s grave paid tribute to the skeleton. Half hidden by the flowers was a large, clear plastic death figure, and behind it was a sound system at which one of Queta’s sons would soon lead the Rosary. Behind that, Queta cackled in answer to a question. Yes, it was true that the Catholic Church disapproved of her “Little Skinny One,” she said. “But have you noticed how empty their churches are?”

Queta’s genius has been to create out of her Catholic faith an inclusive syncretic ritual: a Rosary, which is recited complete with Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer; special prayers for those in jail; and a culminating, quasi-Pentecostal moment when the faithful all lift their effigy to Heaven to “charge it with energy.” It is a cult, Queta says, accurately, that does not discriminate. A Catholic priest might extend grudging absolution to those who confess that they have just sold several grams of crystal meth to a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but only at Queta’s Rosary can you be blessed on a monthly basis without the matter of how you earn a living ever coming up.

Queta, naturally enough, denies that the Santa Muerte is a devotion for drug traffickers—one more element of the narcocultura. Why, then, I wondered, was it perceived as such outside Tepito?

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Because every single time one of them is arrested or killed they find my Little Skinny One on their altar!” From the storefront next to the shrine, where she sells candles and other devotional objects for the cult, she blew another kiss and called out to her patron saint, “Preciosa! ” ♦